


viparinama

by toujours_nigel



Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, suggested infanticide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 14:29:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17225771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: Draupadi wakes on the banks of the Ganga in time to watch young Pritha crouch down with a casket in her hands.





	viparinama

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AllegoriesInMediaRes (AllegoriesInMediasRes)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllegoriesInMediasRes/gifts).



Draupadi wakes on the banks of the Ganga. Her garments are their wonted red; her hair braided for the first time in fourteen years, blood-rinsed and dried in the smoke of a thousand pyres; every ornament proclaiming her Empress, blinking gold, winking red. She wakes alone, in a soft nest of vines, wild peaflowers at her feet, and staggers out of the wood into the sun.

She drank deep of wine and weariness, and she spoke, oh, till dawn left night’s bed, to Krishna of death and destiny. If this is a trick she is too old for it and he is older still, but this is not Kurukshetra, the land blooming and not blood-ridden, the river younger and wilder. Somewhere north, and she has been moved in the night. Who in the Pandava camp could have the heart for it, after the days they’ve had, and the nights of wailing?

On the bank is a girl oddly alone when Draupadi can see gold glinting at her wrists and in her hair, kneeling by the water with a casket. She holds herself when Draupadi looks at her as still as an animal hoping to avoid notice, and her clothes are the muddy grey of the silt. Almost a good disguise, save that the eyes she raises to Draupadi are Yadava eyes, large and deep-set under a narrow brow, and the face in which those eyes are set Draupadi would know anywhere. This child crouched with a casket in the straggling weeds of the river bank is thirty years distant from the woman who bound Draupadi to her sons, but she is Kunti regardless, and in the casket in her hands, beginning the infant’s forlorn wailing...

This is what comes of counting over her regrets with someone sloughing off humanity like a serpent’s old skin. He had shown Arjuna his true form on the battlefield, he had turned Arjuna into a woman in enchanted waters and taught him pleasure. Draupadi would take either fate before she turned a merciful hand towards Karna, she would be Brihannala, Shikhandi, beggared, dead.

But the little girl on the river bank raises herself to her knees and asks, hushed, “Are you a goddess?”

She can summon gods, but only to fill a single need. Draupadi walks towards her, slowly and with a smile, and says, “Did you summon a goddess, princess?”

“Only strength,” the girl says, “but I was afraid... you look like a goddess.”

“No, my feet sink into the soil. May I sit beside you?”

The girl nods, and watches Draupadi ease her creaking knees to the ground with the narrow concentration she will keep all her life. “You are not human.”

“I am fireborn and farseeing,” Draupadi agrees, and nudges Pritha’s hands away from the casket and works the lid open.

“You might be an enemy spy,” Pritha says, but folds her hands in her lap as Draupadi looks at the newborn in his bed of rich cloth, the armour glowing even in dawn dimness. He has a little pale scar on his forehead that will linger all his life, but his limbs are all perfect and he is clean and sweet-smelling, like any well-loved child. Somebody has been helping Pritha care for him; somebody has kept her alive through the birth. She is thin, not grown into the lissom beauty that will linger through youth and well into her middle years, and instead looks stretched tall like any girl of fifteen.

“Of a certainty I know more than you might think safe: you are Pritha called Kunti, foster-daughter of King Kuntibhoj of Kuntipura, daughter of King Shurasena. You have two sisters you have never seen, and a brother in the dungeons of Kamsa son and usurper of King Ugrasena.”

“So much any spy might know, or any woman who had stood in cheering crowds as my father’s chariot went by,” Pritha says, and Draupadi kisses her hair, delighted. These Yadava princes, one could only laugh and love them.

The little princess flinches from the touch.

“Well,” Draupadi says, and touches the child instead while his mother watches, impassive. “You were granted a boon by a sage who ought have known better, and you called down the sun to your bed, and he left you with this boy. You kept him a secret and now you hope to surrender him to the river. I do not know how you kept him a secret.”

“If you are a spy, you are not very good,” Pritha concedes. “The King went on a pilgrimage to Kasi, and thence followed the royal entourage to Magadha to witness the coronation of the Emperor Jarasandha, whose mothers hail from that kingdom. He has not seen me in eight months. The women of the palace love me, knowing no better, and have hidden the truth from his ministers.”

“A son of yours shall some day kill Jarasandha,” Draupadi tells her, “and a nephew of yours shall help him do the deed. You must pray for rain, princess, that will flood the Yamuna and seep into Kamsa’s dungeons, that your brother might smuggle his son to safety.”

“Rain will swell these waters, too, and carry my son to whatever home is fated.” She closes the lid without waiting to see whether Draupadi has moved her hands. “I prayed for strength. Help me, if you are an answer to my prayer.”

She is little and mutinous, and Draupadi loves her as she loves Suthanu: better than her sons, as though her heart will shatter. “He will ally himself with the greatest enemies of any sons you bear for your husband, if you send him adrift, and their enmity will be a sword-shard in your heart forever more.”

“You bid me keep him? The King will know, and he can scarcely bear me now.”

“He is a King of the Yadava clan,” Draupadi says, unconcerned. “He will come home from Magadha frantic for new alliances; a grandson born of a god shall scarcely anger him. If you fear him, write to your father; having lost his son, he must long for his daughter. You shall have nephews soon, and might go to their mothers instead; do you think Princess Rohini would turn you away?”

“You open so many doors for me,” Pritha says, as suspicious as any of her sons, more. Like Krishna when he suspects a trap. “Yet you bar my way to my one true escape. Do you do it for love of me, or of my son, Agnikanya?”

“I have no love for this son of yours,” Draupadi says, folds her hands together and inclines her head. “You I love dearly, and would see happy as you cannot be with such a secret gnawing at your soul. You, who shall long all your life for the home that abandoned you as a child, could you abandon your own to a lifetime of wondering?”

“Must I keep him? I have known nothing but pain in his begetting and growing. His father fell upon me as an eagle on its prey.”

She is young, so young, and so alone, and Draupadi wants nothing better than to enfold and embrace her. She takes Pritha’s trembling hand in both of hers, and kisses its back, and then the painted palm. “You must not send him adrift. Keep him if you choose, or kill him if you can. You asked for strength and I am here as an answer. I will be your hands, if your own falter in the task.”

“I cannot kill an innocent,” Pritha says, and curls her hand over Draupadi’s thumb when she tries to pull away. “I shall in time, and you know it. Is that why you are surprised? Tell me.”

“You shall do many things to protect your sons, Princess, as any mother might.”

“I hoped to send him to a better life,” Pritha tells her, “but I cannot fight Shakti and hope to win. I shall be guided by you. My son will live or die Partha, and should King Kuntibhoj turn us away, we shall seek some other home.”

“Brave girl,” Draupadi says, and kisses the protruding thumb. “If you have trouble, visit Princess Rohini in Gokul; you might find it an easier home than your father’s palace.”

“Will you... no, you will not come with me. I have heard enough stories to know it, divine messengers never do.” She squares her shoulders and raises her chin, and in the moment she is Yudhishtira after every argument, Arjuna readying himself for a fight, Bhima when his heart runs too far ahead of his tongue, Suthanu pretending to be an adult.

“I shall see you again,” Draupadi tells her. “I shall see you when you are a queen and glorious, and surrounded by sons who think your word the greatest of laws. Now go home, princess, and write letters before the King returns.”

 

She sits in the woods after Pritha leaves, the wicker casket propped on her slender hip. In the growing light the blue of the peaflowers turns iridescent, lengthens to peacock feathers sleek under her searching fingers, and then she is in Indraprastha, in the fountain court of her palace, her hand outstretched towards a peacock’s fanned-out tail, and there is laughter in her ear.

“Thirty years of getting pecked have not taught you caution,” Vasusena says. “I wonder that you have the temerity to tell poor little Suthanu that she must be less of a hoyden.”


End file.
